Inside Texas Tech on KTTZ-TV & KTTZ-FM

Texas Tech Public Television and Radio gives you an inside look at the University. This KTTZ produced show highlights academic accomplishments and much more. Tune in each week as Inside Texas Tech profiles students, staff and successful Texas Tech alum. Check out Inside Texas Tech where great things are happening inside the classroom and out.

“It’s one of the worst things I’ve every seen.” That was the reaction of Nate Fuller, a Texas Tech post-doctoral researcher in biological sciences, when he saw at least 10,000 dead hibernating bats on a cave floor years ago. All died from white nose syndrome, a disease that has decimated more than 5.5 million bats across North America.

Anna Whitlock Henry is playing her flute again. Now, though, she’s doing it without hand tremors she’s suffered since she was in high school. She vows to dedicate her first concert to the doctors who made it possible. And for whom she played a not-so-typical concert in the operating room at Memorial Hermann Hospital at Houston’s Texas Medical Center in late March.

Researchers across the Texas Tech University System have the opportunity to take their inventions or discoveries to the commercial marketplace and get a sizable financial benefit. David Snow, the senior managing director of the Office of Research Commercialization, says the ultimate goal is to help society.

Thomas Mann practices stacking upside down plastic cups upward in a pyramid shape. Then he unstacks them. Quickness in each direction and improving his times are the goals. The 11-year-old has only been cup stacking since early 2017, learning most of his technique from watching on YouTube. At the Mann home in south Lubbock, the hollow, rapid kerplunking sound coming from Thomas’ bedroom is a regular happening.

“There has been some action on every item that’s been brought up, either planning hasn’t been implemented, a time frame for the when the next steps may be taken, but I can assure you, it’s just not sitting in a drawer,” Lawrence Schovanec, Texas Tech’s President, says.

Before becoming the university’s 16th president in 2016, he taught in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. Like all faculty, he was required to have office hours, where he’d meet and discuss academic issues with students. He’s now decided to carry that notion into his role as head of the university.